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OSU's Signature Vegetables

The greenhouse tables are crowded with pots of bean plants ready to reproduce.
Their buds will soon open and the plants will self-pollinate if research assistant
Deborah Kean doesn’t get to them first. Sitting on a stool surrounded by the
eager beans, she works quickly and deliberately. The time is right, and she
has more than a hundred cross-pollinations to do.

Her tweezers unfold the delicate petals that enclose the bud as she shakes
in pollen from the flower of another plant. Then, carefully, she refolds the
outer petals and seals them with tape to keep the incubating seed safe and
sound, moist and enclosed.

So goes the first step in a vegetable breeding process that can take as long
as 15 years before a new variety is released. The goal is to breed vegetables
that are tastier, more nutritious, disease resistant, and easier to harvest,
without using genetic engineering. Jim Myers leads the process as the Baggett-Frazier
Professor of vegetable breeding in the Horticulture Department at OSU. Although
it takes years to cross plants and grow out each new generation, vegetable
processors prefer vegetables bred in the classical manner, Myers says, because
overseas customers have strict requirements to avoid GMO contamination. “It’s
demanding work,” he says, “and students who come out of the OSU breeding program
are in high demand for their experience in this field.”

Thanks to a nurturing climate, wonderful soil, and a heritage of well-bred
varieties, Oregon is blessed with high-quality vegetables. Myers and Kean and
their colleagues are working to make them even better, to improve the vast
vegetable cornucopia of Oregon. “I get such pleasure seeing these vegetables
in the market, or in neighbors’ gardens, and knowing that I had a hand in developing
them,” said Kean. Here are a few examples:

One of the most productive discoveries by OSU vegetable breeders came in the
1960s, when they developed a commercial green bean that would retain its summery
taste and color even when frozen or canned. Since then, the Blue Lake bush
bean has become the industry standard and a favorite of home gardens in Oregon,
as years of research continued to improve its taste, nutritional value, and
yield. And research continues to develop resistance to white mold disease,
which can devastate commercial vegetable fields, especially beans.

One of the earliest breakthroughs was to breed an easier-to-pick bush variety
of Blue Lake to replace the original pole bean. Today, mechanical harvesters
gather about 93,000 tons of green beans each year, mostly from the Willamette
Valley, making Oregon the second-largest producer of green beans in the country,
behind Wisconsin. Throughout the late summer, trucks laden with green beans
deliver the fresh harvest to three primary processors in Salem, Albany, and
Stayton, where they are quick frozen or packed in cans. Processed beans and
other vegetables add more than $23 million to the value of Oregon agriculture
every year.

Oregon Sugar Pod II peas

OSU plant breeders took flat snow peas and pumped them full of tender sweet
peas, and so created a vegetable that kids love to eat. Plant the big, round,
kid-friendly seeds during spring break, and they are ready to harvest on the
first day of summer vacation. And by “harvest” we mean standing in the garden,
plucking pods from vines, and crunching them on the spot.

“This is the way peas will be eaten in the future,” quotes a British seed
company introducing the Oregon delicacy to European gardeners and diners. “It
just doesn’t make sense to go through the tediousness of discarding the pod
if it’s so full of goodness and so delicious to taste.”

Legend tomato

In many ways, a tomato is a tropical plant that comes into its full flavor
with warm days and nights. Tomatoes love Hermiston and Medford, but for much
of the rest of Oregon, cool summers can slow down tomato development and keep
the hot-summer varieties from ripening.

With the goal of developing a cool-climate tomato, Jim Baggett, followed by
Jim Myers,
developed better and better varieties, including Oregon Spring and Siletz.
Their breakthrough is the Legend tomato, an early-bearing tomato that sets
rich-tasting fruit under the cool conditions of much of the Pacific Northwest.

Legend tomatoes are self-fertile, an advantage where chilly spring weather
can keep pollinators from making their rounds at the critical moment. And they
are resistant to late blight, a fungal disease related to the pathogen responsible
for the Irish potato famine of the 1840s.

“Late blight is a difficult disease to breed against because there are so
many different races,” Myers says. If a new race of late blight invades, or
the old race mutates, then resistance may break down. So far, resistance has
held up in the Legend tomato, which carries on the legendary reputation of
OSU-bred vegetables.

Honey Boat squash

Besides snowboarding, winter squash gives Oregonians a reason to love winter.
Developed by legendary OSU vegetable breeder Jim Baggett, Honey Boat and its
cousin Sugar Loaf are as much a signature of an Oregon Thanksgiving as Bandon
cranberries and pickled green beans. A refined Delicata-style squash, Honey
Boat is touted by seed companies as “the sweetest squash in existence.”

Organic broccoli

Organic vegetables aren’t simply the same commercial varieties grown without
benefit of synthetic chemicals. Ideally, varieties produced organically grow
fast enough to outpace pests, broad enough to shade out weeds, and sturdy enough
to resist disease. Organic farmers from both the East and West coasts are working
with OSU researchers to develop better organic broccoli varieties for fresh
markets. Since 2005, Myers has sent more than 500 open-pollinated broccoli
seeds to each participating farmer, who plants them and selects the best of
the offspring to harvest for seed that they send back to Myers. Myers mixes
the seeds from several growers and redistributes them for more testing.

“Our objectives are to develop broccoli varieties adapted to regional organic
growing conditions and engage growers in plant breeding,” Myers said. In return,
growers are testing new broccoli varieties that grow well under organic conditions.

Results have been applauded. “After three years of growing broccoli selected
from a mass cross of varieties made by Jim Myers, we may have finally gotten
it right,” according to Ken Ettinger of the Long Island Seed Project. “Broccoli
is not usually considered a sustainable organic crop, but this may change as
the OSU broccoli becomes more adapted to our Long
Island soils, climate, and cultural practices. In the three years of growing
this broccoli we haven’t had to use any kind of pest or disease control.”